Cats On Tape Win Internet, Art Shows, Awards And Slowly Take Over World

Cat-worshipping has been all the rage for the last three or four years, a trend that I’ve definitely partaken in, because who doesn’t love a cat doing weird things like barking and wearing a melon on their head? Suddenly, it became cool to be a cat lady, to post pictures of you and your cat and title it “girl’s night in!” Cats didn’t become ironic, they became iconic. Meme after meme, cats are proving themselves to be quite the timely celebrities.

Cats have generated so much marketability and popularity, that there are even festivals dedicated to cat home videos. Last Saturday, the Internet Cat Video Festival (kind of like Outside Lands but with cats) was held in Oakland, California. The tour began in Austin’s South by Southwest in March, and there is even a June screening in Vienna, Austria. The plan was to have a local performance of guest-submitted cat videos, and the curators and other artists would pick the best one based on aesthetics and artistic merit. 10,000 people turned up to see a 70-minute video of cat clips, thus turning into a world-wide phenomenon.

These are some of my favorite cat videos:

Cat versus CD Drive. Cat wins.

The classic stalker cat!

Kitten taunts cat with Jedi tricks and receives a pummeling.

This is Henri, the French existentialist cat. His owner and producer is Will Braden, a filmmaker who lives in Seattle who accidentally gained stardom via YouTube. This clip has been viewed more than 7 million times and last summer, it won the “Golden Kitty” award, the Oscar of the cat video world. This led to a deal with Friskies, and now Henri is the spokescat for them.

This is the commercial for Friskies cat food, in which Henri speaks for cats who do not have the voice or power to do so otherwise.